Avoiding The Draft, They Found A Home

December 15, 2004|By Fred A. Bernstein, the New York Times

NELSON, British Columbia -- At a time when more than a few unhappy liberals in the United States are rumbling about moving north -- bombarding the Canadian immigration Web site, fantasizing about Toronto real estate -- Irene Mock and the expatriates in this town of 9,300 people on a 90-mile-long crystalline lake are proof it can be done.

But her move was no mere political protest. In 1970, Mock, who grew up on Long Island, drove her boyfriend to Canada so he could avoid arrest for evading the Vietnam draft.

``Irene didn't want me to go to jail," says Jeff Mock, who is now a tofu maker in Nelson, 400 miles inland from Vancouver. ``Irene is the reason I'm here, and being here changed my whole life."

In Nelson, which some say has the highest concentration of draft resisters in Canada, those men and the women who accompanied them say they rarely think of the events that made them cross the border 30 years ago. But then, as Irene Mock put it, what happened in Nelson this fall ``brought it all back."

What happened was that a local peace activist proposed a monument to honor the ``courageous legacy'' of American draft resisters. The idea provoked outrage in the United States, where the presidential election had reopened wounds of the Vietnam era. Then came calls to boycott Nelson.

``The negative reaction was so immediate and so forceful that everyone was stunned," says Don Gayton, a former high-school football player from Seattle, who raised five children in Nelson after immigrating to Canada during the Vietnam War.

More than 50,000 draft-age Americans went to Canada during the Vietnam years, says John Hagan, a professor at Northwestern University and the author of Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada (Harvard, 2001). About half of them remain in Canada, Hagan says, even though Jimmy Carter pardoned them in 1977.

"They have lost their sense of Americanness and overwhelmingly identify themselves as Canadians," Hagan says.

Among the attractions of Nelson at the time was its history of war resistance. The surrounding Slocan Valley was settled in the teens of the last century by the Dukhobors, a sect of Christian pacifists who fled Russia to avoid serving in the czar's army.

Thanks to the Dukhobors and the Vietnam draft resisters, the town has long been a haven for free spirits.

``It's quite a unique blend," says Alan Middlemiss, an owner of Holy Smoke, a store that sells marijuana in its "produce section." Selling marijuana is illegal in British Columbia but tolerated by local authorities as long as minors are not served. Middlemiss says it was the draft resisters who brought marijuana cultivation to the Slocan Valley.

If true, that was half a lifetime ago. Now mostly in their 50s, the expatriates are more likely to talk about how to pay for retirement in a town that has offered few conventional careers.

They seem especially proud of their community, which has more yoga instructors, organic bakers and acupuncturists than some large cities. "It fits me like an old blanket," says Gayton, the former football player.

Jeff Mock, who has been divorced from Irene for more than 20 years, occasionally visits the United States. But on one trip 14 years ago, he had an accident that left him in a coma. In Canada he would have received free health care. In the United States, treatment cost a fortune, he says over coffee at the all Seasons Cafe. He says he has never thought of moving back.

Isaac Romano, a peace activist who moved to Nelson from Seattle in 2001, befriended several of the resisters. "Among the right wing in the U.S. they are often stereotyped as cowards," he says. "It broke my heart to have to see this kind of ridicule to a population that has contributed so much" to Canada's tolerance and creativity.

Romano held a news conference to announce his idea for a large bronze monument in the form of a man and a woman greeted by a Canadian with outstretched arms.

He expected to get a small write-up in The Nelson Daily News. But the announcement found its way to American television, and within days Nelson was inundated with hate mail, much of it in the guest book section of the town's Web site.

A radio station in Spokane, Wash., three hours' drive south, called on Americans to boycott Nelson. Some skiers canceled trips to the area, says Roy Hueckendorff, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce.

``I've talked to people who lost fathers, brothers in Vietnam," Hueckendorff says. ``The very idea that you would celebrate this is beyond their comprehension."

The city's mayor, Dave Elliott, supported the monument at first. But when business owners who depend on tourism expressed concern about the boycott, he decided no public funds would be used for any monument lacking ``broad public support."

The festival, scheduled for July 7 and 8, 2006, may be, Gayton says, ``like a class reunion, where people say, `I want to be counted, I want to be a part of this.' "